As individuals, we (mostly) want companies building open source to thrive, particularly if they aren't behemoths of the industry. Ultimately though, efficiency matters more than sentiment. Companies rightly prefer a "good enough" product from a single source; even just avoiding a second enterprise agreement negotiation would make the AWS version worthwhile. Throwing unusual licenses into the mix, I guess new custom for Elastic Co is mostly going to be passed along by the other cloud providers feeding the anti-AWS prejudice within some customers.
AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
351–360 of 969 posts
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#352I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…
It feel like live by the sword, die by the sword to me. Elastic because a highly successful business off the product being open source and then leveraging that into funding and enterprise licensing and maintenence. To turn around after and go 'we love open source... No not like that' is disingenuous at best. The license choice was always yours to make, you took the one that gave you the best growth model that got you…
What's the major difference between Apache and MIT license?
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s even more boring is critiquing capitalism when that has actually nothing to do with the problem at hand. I brought up socialism as a counter example of how there is very little practical way to solve this issue with a different economic system. You’re free to bring up a different example of how an economic system will help the conundrum of preserving economic exchange and user freedom. A Potlatch gift economy…
Right, I don't know the answer here. I just want people to start thinking seriously about the problem, because neither the regulatorily-captured free market nor the Politburo sound like great options. And I'm mostly agreeing with the comment I'm replying to, because it is concretely thinking seriously about alternative models. "Capitalism, but your company can't get too big" seems fairly compelling tbh.
Regulated capitalism is certainly a start. Would be nice.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you insinuating that's a small amount of data? You've got to be kidding.
I've seen devs toss crud into infra with debug logs enabled, with millions of lines of deprecated log messages, etc., and the infra budget eats their costs. It's insane. Unless you're literally Facebook, or ingesting data from CERN's LHC... what possible use case requires 100GB of text data ingest per day ? Maybe it's a case of someone throwing a Service Mesh into a Microservices K8s cluster and logging all the thing…
4-5MB/min per VM for input/output traffic in compressed logs of application servers. Around 100ish VMs/site. That's a half GB/min. 700GB+/day in plain text logs per a single site from app servers alone.
Normally that's no issue as the data is stored in SANs and not sent onto the cloud for analysis, just giving a perspective.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. Yet it would've prevented AWS from undercutting their paid offering in the place I'm at now that would rather pay for it than self-host it. The lesson I'm taking away from this is just use a license like they're using now from day 1. Totally "open" open source only works if…
> Nothing about the new ES license would've prevented me from using it for free in the previous places I've used it for free, as far as I can tell. While true, personally I'd not be willing to contribute to such a project. Of course, such a license would require legal blessing, which in itself is a lot of (paper) work. What if, the company decides to change the license in an year?
I think it’s significant in this case that most of the development of ES and the underlying engine is done by Elastic. This re-licensing is only of interest because it means most ongoing work on the project will now happen under the new license. If that was not the case nobody would care, the contributors could fork back to Apache 2.0 and continue. After all, the ElasticSearch license used up until 7.1 also allows me to fork the project under a new restrictive license, but nobody is likely to care if I did.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Popular OSS licenses were designed in an era to allow direct customers (businesses) to directly install and use the software, and redistribution means only distributing the package. Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing, that large, profitable middlemen will directly host the software, pass through just the API, with zero customer exposure to the running instance…
Then Elastic should've come up with a non-Apache-2.0 license at inception. Licenses exist for a reason. The onus is on the person choosing the license to choose one which aligns with their intentions. You cannot and should not expect downstream consumers of the software to confine themselves to some subset of the actual license's allowed activities just because it's the "nice" thing to do (as of course this assumes m…
What open source license would prevent someone from capitalizing on your project?
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#357There has to be a way for an OSS project / companies to offer licences to managed service providers in a way that gets them supported financially. That would be a massive win for everyone Something like: okay yes, this is OSS, except if you want to offer it as a managed service, in which case you need to purchase a licence.
That's the AGPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
so why didn't they switch to that.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously Amazon has the legal right to make a fork, but I think it's understandable why people would still prefer that the people who actually did the innovation and the majority of the work get their cut of the insane profits AWS is making.
This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.
Confluent absolutely wants a cut for hosted Kafka usage, though, and has made similar changes to Elastic.
https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/
> Under the Confluent Community License, you can access the source code and modify or redistribute it; there is only one thing you cannot do, and that is use it to make a competing SaaS offering.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the whole point of open source. Every contributor to something like Kafka or numpy is not expecting a cut from the thousands of companies that use it.
My two cents: Open source is a type of generosity. Generosity is good in the software world because the rules of the game benefits everybody the most when everybody are generous. I believe it's similar to prisoners dilemma but with even bigger benefits when we are all generous. However, it's also a tit-for-tat game. When others start to be greedy it makes some sense to be greedy yourself. Thus short circuiting the ga…
Maybe?
Brian Behlendorf didn't write Apache (or more accurately, patch NCSA httpd) out of "generosity", he was doing what was known back then as "scratching his own itch". Sure, he generously gave it away as well, but that was after he'd done the work to benefit _himself_.
Same with Larry Wall and Perl. He wrote the language he wanted, and shared it afterwards. He didn't write it out of generosity (and to be fair, he is 100% the sort of person who might have).
I think the dual license strategy Larry chose for Perl really shines light on his motivations, "use GPL if you want to, use the enormously more permissive Artistic License if you want to". He just wanted anybody who might find his software useful for any reason at all (including becoming insanely rich, if they could work out how to do so) to be able to use Perl.
Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because an 800lbs gorilla is trying to crush an open source project? They could've come up with some agreement to oem Elastic and they both could've benefited. Instead they decided to just build a competing service at the expense of Elastic. It's the same reason most of the community had no time for Oracle forking RHEL. >AWS contributes improvements to the project. Per a poster below, 9 PRs out of 41,000 (I haven't v…
Someone at Elastic didn't do the math on this. Amazon can easily fund developers, they just didn't because they didn't have to. Now that the gorilla has been enraged woe to the thing that pissed it off. We'll see if amazon actually contributes to the new fork. The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are wr…
> The fact that amazon is in a better position to make money off of open source software is part of the calculation that startups should be making if they are writing open source software
So what you're saying is people shouldn't work on open source projects. That's essentially what your statement boils down to.